Your starry voice all shadow now
and the earth dark again
with your great changes of heart.
And by day the grass going brown in places
under the broad shadows of the maple trees.
Now, everywhere I am talked to by silence
so it is clear I have no access to you;
I do not exist for you, you have drawn
a line through my name.
In what contempt do you hold us
to believe only loss can impress
your power on us,
the first rains of autumn shaking the white lilies---
When you go, you go absolutely;
deducting visible life from all things
but not all life,
lest we turn from you.
-- Louise Gluck, (1943- ), American poet, and teacher, US Poet Laureate 2003, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2020. Poem from The Wild Iris, 1992.
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